[SHOEBOX] Vowel Harmony trouble

At 11:44 21.7.2000 -0400, Jeff Sheets wrote:

>So I am obviously very familiar with the Generate rule.  It's primarily the
>lookup steps that are giving me Vowel Harmony trouble, but I'll go back when
>I have time and mess around with it.  Last I checked you can't use rule files
>directly with the lookup step, but I may be wrong.
I probably was not clear enough about what I suggested for recognition
purposes (I'm often too verbose!)  Moreover I refined the technique a
little this morning :-)  What if you start with lexicon entries like:
    \lx -llA
    \a -llä
    \a -lla
    \ps ADESSIVE
    \ge at

    \lx isä
    \ps S
    \co S means substantive noun
    \co N would be "substantive OR adjective noun"
    \ge father

    \lx talo
    \ps S
    \ge house
which hopefully will cause forms like _isällä_ and _talolla_ to be
correctly recognized.  If you don't like the idea of using an archiphoneme
for each alternating vowel pair a lexicon entry
    \lx -llä
    \a -llä
    \a -lla
    ...
might still help towards a nicer recognition.
Or what about treating VH as an underlying infix :
    \lx -"-
    \a ä
    \u a -"-
    \a ö
    \u o -"-
    \a y
    \u u -"-
    \ps VH

    \lx -lla
    \a -llä
    \a -lla
    \ps ADESSIVE
    \ge at
Granted your VH seems not to be so readily recognizable on the surface as
in Finnish.  C.f. "Infixes" in the Shoebox help file.  It occurs to me that
ablaut may perhaps be handled in such a way:

    \lx -%-
    \ps Q.ABL
    \co qualitative ablaut

    \lx -:-
    \ps L.GRA
    \co long grade

    \lx -¤-
    \ps Z.GRA
    \co zero grade

    \lx bher
    \a bher
    \co normal grade is
    \co its own underlying form
    \co and the default (unmarked)
    \a bhor
    \u bher -%-
    \a bhêr
    \u bher -:-
    \a bhôr
    \u bher -%- -:-
    \a bhr
    \co was taken as the default by the Indic grammarians
    \u bher -¤-
    \ps ROOT
    \ge carry
(It would be left to the human to tell if *H_1..3 are involved... :-)

Again I have not had the time to actually try this out.  Just ideas that I
hope are helpful.



/BP 8^)>
--
  B.Philip Jonsson mailto:bpX@netg.se mailto:melrochX@mail.com (delete X)
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